FERET

The Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) program was a government-sponsored project that aimed to create a large, automatic face-recognition system for intelligence, security, and law enforcement purposes. The program began in 1993 under the combined leadership of Dr. Harry Wechsler at George Mason University (GMU) and Dr. Jonathan Phillips at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland and resulted in the development of the Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) database. The goal of the FERET program was to advance the field of face recognition technology by establishing a common database of facial imagery for researchers to use and setting a performance baseline for face-recognition algorithms. The Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) program was a government-sponsored project that aimed to create a large, automatic face-recognition system for intelligence, security, and law enforcement purposes. The program began in 1993 under the combined leadership of Dr. Harry Wechsler at George Mason University (GMU) and Dr. Jonathan Phillips at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland and resulted in the development of the Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) database. The goal of the FERET program was to advance the field of face recognition technology by establishing a common database of facial imagery for researchers to use and setting a performance baseline for face-recognition algorithms. Potential areas where this face-recognition technology could be used include: The FERET database has been used by more than 460 research groups and is currently managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). By 2017, the FERET database has been used to train artificial intelligence programs and computer vision algorithms to identify and sort faces. The FERET program first began as a way to unify a large body of face-recognition technology research under a standard database. Before the program’s inception, most researchers created their own facial imagery database that was attuned to their own specific area of study. These personal databases were small and usually consisted of images from less than 50 individuals. The only notable exceptions were the following: The lack of a common database made it difficult to compare the results of face recognition studies in the scientific literature because each report involved different assumptions, scoring methods, and images. Most of the papers that were published did not use images from a common database nor followed a standard testing protocol. As a result, researchers were unable to make informed comparisons between the performances of different face-recognition algorithms. In September 1993, the FERET program was spearheaded by Dr. Harry Wechsler and Dr. Jonathan Phillips under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Defense Counterdrug Technology Development Program. The first facial images for the FERET database were collected from August 1993 to December 1994, a time period known as Phase I. The pictures were initially taken with a 35-mm camera at both GMU and ARL facilities, and the same physical setup was used in each photography session to keep the images consistent. For each individual, the pictures were taken in sets, including two frontal views, a right and left profile, a right and left quarter profile, a right and left half profile, and sometimes at five extra locations. Therefore, a set of images consisted of 5 to 11 images per person. At the end of Phase I, the FERET database had collected 673 sets of images, resulting in over 5000 total images. At the end of Phase I, five organizations were given the opportunity to test their face-recognition algorithm on the newly-created FERET database in order to compare how they performed against each other. There five principal investigators were: